I am in a meeting with Parker Harris, the co-founder of Salesforce.com. We have 30 minutes. I am live blogging our discussion. We are starting the conversation with a chat about activity streams.
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3:35 p.m.: Where we will go – activity stream is more about business and work. it is moving into workflows and a user interface. Salesforce. com is working on ways to use activity streams with task management, activity management — working with activity streams around customer service.
Parker compared it to threaded discussions. Customer service as an e-mail stream is a threaded discussion. A forum is a threaded discussion. These are all ways to interact ina service world. Salesforce.com is working how to bring together the different processes in an organization into the UI that comes with activity streams. It will be a common interface. In its beginnings, Salesforce.com looked to Amazon and other consumer Web properties. Today, the influence is Facebook. It’s Cloud 2. It comes to me in an activity stream. The system is intelligently telling me what is going on. That intelligence will be increasingly important.
3:43 p.m.: We are now talking about the way multiple presence applications are running at once. Harris is talking about the collaboration that can happen and how they see it at Salesforce.com. People are geo-located all over the world. That’s where DimDim fits in. It can be used in tandem with activity streams and other collaboration tools.
3:47 p.m. How does Radian6 fit in? Salesforce.com acquired Radian6 last week. He says Radian6 is less about collaboration. It is more about social monitoring. You can ask: “Are there issues, are there complaints? Is the marketing campaign getting the right response?” Salesforce.com launched its Super Bowl ad and the free version of Chatter. They wanted to see how people were responding. How do you see the activity around an event like the Super Bowl? How do you know what is going on? Radian6 is monitoring what is going on. You can start to see what is going on. Are customers asking for this? Parker says Radian6 has a business for this. There is definite demand. For example, Dell is a customer. They started using a light offering. Dell wanted to step up to something more on an enterprise scale. They started using Radian6. And they love it. Radian6 is a a product is more for the mid-market and enterprise.
3:53 p.m.: I think that is impying we are not doing other things, Harris said when I asked about Dennis Howlett’s post that questioned the Salesforce.com strategy. in the post., Howlett said that Salesforce.com is not talking about in-memory technology. Harris said there is a reason the company is going toward Chatter. People are looking for new ways to communicate. Chatter has been a game changer for Salesforce. To Dennis Howell point – Harris said the company still has amazing technology that is not in production. it is more about memory than in disk. He sad he is happy to buy Dennis a beer and discuss. I said to please include me as well.
3:57 p.m.: I asked how is database.com coming along. The company is exposing database.com to Heroku so anyone can use it. It is being developed so you can write Ruby code and plug into the database. You could write code anywhere for that matter, he said. Choose your language, choose your tools. You will take data from Force.com. To Dennis point, maybe in-memory is important.
There’s the bell from the Port of SanFrancisco. And we have to go. Thanks, Parker!
4:03 p.m. That wraps things up with our brief interview. Parker had to go to a meeting with Robin Harris, Dell’s CIO and I have to get to Doc Searls talk at Sugarcon. We’ll be back soon!
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